arXiv:2509.21465cs.LG2025-09

用大模型生成可解释的决策树,小数据也能超好用

Talking Trees: Reasoning-Assisted Induction of Decision Trees for Tabular Data

  • 大模型基于推理自动构建决策树,结合先验知识与数据学习
  • 在小数据上性能超越CART和非贪心树算法,接近集成模型
  • 结果带可读推理链,方便检查偏见,还能人工干预不进数据

表格基础模型在低资源表格问题中日益流行,它们通过在大量合成数据上预训练来弥补小规模训练数据的不足。预训练获得的先验知识带来卓越性能,但模型成为难以解释的黑箱,且推理成本高。本文探索一种替代策略:利用具备推理能力的大语言模型,在代理式设置下为小型表格数据集生成决策树。我们设计了一套最小化工具集,用于构建、分析和操作决策树。配备这些工具后,大语言模型将先验知识与数据学习相结合,生成轻量级决策树,其性能优于CART和近期非贪心树学习器,并在低资源表格任务中保持与树集成模型的竞争力。单个代理式决策树虽已媲美最先进黑盒模型,还附带人类可读的推理轨迹,可用于检查偏见和数据泄露。此外,基于推理的大模型生成过程支持额外人工输入,无需将其纳入数据。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Tabular foundation models are becoming increasingly popular for low-resource tabular problems. These models make up for small training datasets by pretraining on large volumes of synthetic data. The prior knowledge obtained via pretraining provides the exceptional performance, but the resulting model becomes a black box that is difficult to interpret and costly for inference. In this work, we explore an alternative strategy: using reasoning-capable LLMs to induce decision trees for small tabular datasets in an agentic setup. We design a minimal set of tools for constructing, analyzing, and manipulating decision trees. Equipped with these tools, the LLM combines its prior knowledge with learning from data to produce a lightweight decision tree that outperforms CART and recent non-greedy tree learners and remains competitive with tree ensembles on low-resource tabular problems. While a single agentic decision tree is competitive with state-of-the-art black box models, it also comes with a human-readable reasoning trace that can be checked for biases and data leaks. Furthermore, the reasoning-based LLM's creation process allows for additional human input to be incorporated into the tree without it being captured in data.

决策树大模型可解释性小样本

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